By the Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson
A Christmas many years ago, my parents accepted an invitation to come stay with some friends who were seasonal caretakers of a floating lodge out in the very remotest wilderness. The lodge was completely off grid, and constructed on top of large old growth cedar timbers and planks, all moored in a bay in the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska. It was only reachable by float plane and boat.
I remember the holiday spent doing the most mundane and ordinary things: reading books and comics, playing cards, stoking the fire, drinking tea, skipping rocks across the thin veneer of ice in the bay around the floating lodge. It was a slow Christmas – no family movie nights or music on the radio. We read by oil lamp and warmed ourselves by the massive wood stove in the central living space. At night we all huddled under suffocating layers of quilts and wool blankets, doing our best to stave off the cold in the long dark. As a child I remember feeling intermittently bored, disconnected from friends, and all the modern conveniences of home. As an adult now, I look back with great fascination and even yearning for the simple pleasure of a slow Christmas spent with family and friends.
It is no secret to anyone who has known me for a while, that I truly love the season of Advent with its injunction to slow down and wait. While the world is already celebrating Christmas and moving at lightspeed through all of the traditions of the holiday, the church bids us slow down and prepare slowly and patiently for something as grand as the arrival of Jesus in our midst. What frustrates me each year, as I try my darnedest to be in Advent, is that as soon as Christmas arrives, all of the celebrations stop! The radio station dedicated to Christmas music reverts to terrible pop. The Christmas displays shift to Valentines, and the focus shifts elsewhere, as if the holiday season were over instead of just beginning.
In her powerful book, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations For Staying Human, Cole Arthur Riley invites her readers into a practice of celebrating Christmas as an act of faithful resistance against just such hurry. She writes,
In Christmastide, we give joy time to breathe. For twelve days we bask in the reality that the divine cared enough about the oppressed that they were willing to abandon the privilege of paradise and be made mortal. Particularly the morality of a babe – small and needy and powerless. Christ is not born self-sufficient but must rely on God’s creation to be nurtured and sustained. How quickly do we rush God from womb to death? From manger to cross. Christmastide invites us into a slower story. A Christ who at present cannot speak, cannot teach – whose dignity, much like ours, is foremost in his very being. Behold the child drinks from Mary’s breast. Listen as he stirs and cries through the night. This is a slow miracle. We pause. We behold.
Slowing down for Advent makes total sense. I was surprised by this invitation to celebrate a slow Christmas. I like it and I’m here for it. Let’s face it, the end of the year that always follows the feast of the Incarnation, is also a time in the world when so much exhausting work must be done. In the fiscal realm we must close the book on one year while making provisions for the year ahead. In the political world, one regime is ending and another begins. In the academic world the papers and exams are being graded before the plunge into a new semester and new learning. All over the world, people are exhausted and in need of a pause. It makes sense that we would pause, with this miracle child, with his mother and father, that we would behold and listen and linger. For, a weary world rejoices. Christ the savior is born.
